Are Bees Back Up on Their Knees?

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CreditMelody Newcomb

By Noah Wilson-Rich

Sept. 24, 2014

IN 2006, beekeepers in Pennsylvania’s apple country noticed the first sign of many bad things to come. Once thriving beehives were suddenly empty, devoid of nearly all worker bees, but with an apparently healthy, if lonely, queen remaining in place. Over a period of just three months, tens of thousands of honeybees were totally gone. Multiply this across millions of beehives in millions of apiaries in the more than 22 states that were soon affected, and suddenly we faced a huge, tragic mystery. Up to 24 percent of American apiaries were experiencing colony collapse disorder (C.C.D.).

Despite the new name for this phenomenon, C.C.D. is not an isolated or unprecedented event. Unexplained mass bee die-offs have occurred throughout recorded history, including some as far back as the years 950, 992 and 1443, when Ireland’s beekeepers noted remarkably high mortality events. Reports from the Cache Valley in Utah in 1903 described thousands of dead hives; around the same time, the Isle of Wight in England faced a near total loss of honeybees.

I became a beekeeper in 2005. When C.C.D. started, I was studying how social animals like honeybees resisted disease. We still don’t really know why C.C.D. was happening, but it looks as if we are turning the corner: Scientists I’ve spoken to in both academia and government have strong reason to believe that C.C.D. is essentially over. This finding is based on data from the past three years — or perhaps, more accurately, the lack thereof. There have been no conclusively documented cases of C.C.D. in the strict sense. Perhaps C.C.D. will one day seem like yet another blip on the millennium-plus timeline of unexplained bee die-offs. Luckily, the dauntless efforts of beekeepers have brought bee populations back each time.

While this is undoubtedly good news, we cannot let it blind us to a hard truth. Bees are still dying; it’s just that we’re finding the dead bodies now, whereas with C.C.D., they were vanishing. Bees are still threatened by at least three major enemies: diseases, chemicals (pesticides, fungicides, herbicides, etc.) and habitat loss.

C.C.D. changed my own career trajectory as I moved away from basic science into applied research, assisting other beekeepers by bringing bee science to the public. Specialists have been talking among themselves about the waning of C.C.D., but have not articulated this to the community at large.

C.C.D. created momentum for the greater cause of bee health, of acknowledging the importance of pollinators. We cannot lose this momentum now. Honeybees pollinate more than 100 fruit and vegetable crops that we rely on for food. According to the entomologist Nicholas W. Calderone at Cornell, bees contribute more than $15 billion annually to the economy in the United States alone, and that number soars past $100 billion globally.

And yet we are still losing 30 percent of bees annually in the United States. While this figure is startling, these losses differ from C.C.D. because they appear to have stabilized to a relatively predictable level. The danger to bees no longer seems to be increasing.

Like those of most beekeepers, my own honeybee hive losses typically happen in winter. As spring turns to summer, my beekeeping team identifies the largest hives and then splits them into two or more to make up for winter’s losses. As for the farmers who need these bees for pollination, the high annual loss rates have forced them to increasingly rely on migratory beekeeping operations, renting bees instead of owning them, which increases the cost of their growing operations. These higher fees, naturally, are passed on to the consumer. The constant churn of moving rented beehives can’t be good for the bees either.

The reliance of farmers on migratory beekeeping operations has increased exponentially since their inception around the 1950s. Most honeybee hives today live on flatbed trucks rather than in permanent apiaries. Our future of living with bees has got to be smarter than this.

To make our pollination practices efficient once again, we need to pay attention to the data. Just last year, Jeffery S. Pettis of the United States Department of Agriculture and his colleagues published data indicating that honeybees appeared to be getting credit from farmers for work that other bee species were actually doing. We continue to get crops of blueberries, cranberries, cucumbers, watermelons and pumpkins, but honeybee hives in those fields are not filled with pollen from those crops.

If honeybees aren’t pollinating them, then what is? The answer most likely lies with the lesser-known 20,000 or so related species of bee. These other bee species could be affected by factors that caused C.C.D. or other honeybee diseases; we just don’t know. We need more research into these other pollinator species in order to make our agricultural system more efficient, increase crop yields, reduce food costs for the consumer, and get those honeybees off flatbed trucks.

Behavioral economics can help us find solutions to the agricultural efficiency challenge by creating financial incentives for bee-friendly farming practices. Outdated monoculture farming subsidies like those that go to corn growers should be diverted to farmers and growers who are planting a diversity of crops, including wildflowers. Federal tax incentives should go to farmers, beekeepers and everyday citizens who opt for permanent pollinator sources.

Bees are not the only ones that would benefit from these policy changes; many farmers would see an increase in sustainability and profitability. It’s a Band-Aid solution, but it can work.

The future of bees — all bees, not just honeybees — remains obscure. But it isn’t just government policy that needs to change. To make the natural world after C.C.D. a better place, we all need to start doing things differently.

Noah Wilson-Rich is the founder and chief scientific officer of the Best Bees Company, and the author of “The Bee: A Natural History.”